Christmas in Beirut

My Christmas Eve started around, well, about five o’clock when I went out to snap some photos around Hamra in dusk beneath the flutter of the bats of Beirut. The capitalist presence of Christmas is alive and well in Beirut. The spiritual Christmas? Not so much.

I ventured to downtown around 8pm, walking the half hour from Hamra so I could look at the Christmas lights along the way. There weren’t too many to see. I was a sight myself, for I was walking. No one walks anywhere in Beirut. They complain for hours on end about the traffic but heaven forbid anyone gets out of his car and walks anywhere. I took the long way, cutting down to St. George’s Marina where Prime Minister Hariri was killed five years ago in a car bomb. The “Stop Solidare” sign was back up on the bombed out St. George’s Hotel. (Solidare is Hariri's company that rebuilt downtown after the war. The protest is a result of the destruction of many old buildings and the development of the coast, which is cutting the people off from the sea, among other reasons.) The sea was darker than the night; it was as if I walked along the edge of the world. Even the Christmas lights the city had strung up along the road weren’t enough to escape the feeling of darkness.

Downtown was bright, though. It was bright thanks to Beirut Souks, the shopping center that seemingly is the only thing in existence downtown, the thing rebuilt by Solidare. Someone had made the bombed out building at the westernmost edge of the souks beautiful with lights and Christmas trees in every window. A thinking person couldn’t escape the bullet holes, however. They had tried to mask the destruction with Christmas but the bullet holes were still there, turning green and purple and blue and red while the people beneath them drank coffee and smoked and talked about trivial things.

The lights were plenty but there was no Christmas spirit, not the kind of magic you feel when there is snow on the ground and you're gathering in warm houses with fireplaces and stuffing yourself full of food and eggnog. There's something about palm trees and sixty degrees that makes a fat guy in a thick red coat a little out of place. I walked around the corner by ancient mosques and the Roman archaeological site beneath the souks and the glitter of stores selling nothing necessary and the people that made Christmas seem like a carnival.

Before I reached the church, I wandered passed Martyr’s Square that had once been a beautiful space full of trees and people and now it is just a parking lot and rubble. Some of the rubble is Roman, uncovered by bombs during the war after everything on top was destroyed. The stones had sat for a thousand years but now they seem as uninteresting as cinder blocks. A Christmas tree stood on the square, surrounded by hijab clad women and jabbering men fresh out of the Hariri mosque, wielding cameras and arousing a clamor as if they were participating in some sort of pagan ceremony around the pagan tree. The traffic was thick and even more unruly than usual. Car horns and Arabic music blasted into the night beneath random displays of fireworks. A parade with three floats full of Santas blocked up traffic. It felt more like Mardi Gras than Christmas.

St. George’s – the largest of the Maronite churches in Beirut – didn’t open its doors until 10pm. I had an hour to kill so I stopped in for an apple pie latte at Costa. (It was disgusting.) St. George’s is building a massive bell tower – presumably because the massive Hariri mosque next door makes the church look like a chapel in comparison and the Maronites feel insecure about it. (Maronite insecurity about their minority status is the source of a heckuva lot of political tension and conflict in Lebanon.)

When the church doors opened I went inside expecting to see something beautiful like the Lebanese version of the Vatican or something, but I was forgetting that the church had been on the front line of a 15 year war. If you really looked you could see patch marks from bullet holes, but the restoration folks did a pretty good job of hiding the war, though the stainglass windows looked like they had been made in haste, as they lack the adornment and color characteristic of older churches. The inside of the church is something resembling a European palace – French, Italian, I couldn’t say – but it didn’t look like Western churches. It was all rather square aside from the nave, which is divided into three rounded sections like Orthodox churches. On the left side was a painting of Mary and on the right was Jesus, while in the middle were four saints holding scrolls – I can only assume they were the gospel “writers.” Then in the very center of the church was a painting of St. George slaying the dragon just like in the Orthodox churches. Silly Christians, there’s no such thing as dragons. St. George must have been reading too much Harry Potter.

But the mass itself followed Catholic liturgy to a T. It didn’t matter that it was all in Arabic – I understood everything that was going on. It was fun to hear the Apostle’s Creed and Our Father and even though I didn’t know the words, I knew exactly what they were saying. Amen is pronounced “all meen” and peace be with you is salam alakum and when the priest in his red and gold priestly robes and his pointed hat said peace be with you, I smiled when the response was “wa maka idhen” because I knew that was what the response would be. That’s the cool thing about Catholicism – it doesn’t matter where on earth you go – the mass is exactly the same and you don’t even need to understand all of the words to understand what is going on.

But the people in the church…well, I have never seen such disrespect in a church. I arrived two hours before mass began because I 1) wanted to get a seat and in the US midnight mass is always full, 2) wanted to have time to look around the church since I’d never been in, and 3) wanted to watch the people. The first people to arrive were many Filipinos who sat in the last three rows. I thought how sad it was that they felt the need to sit in the back. After about a half hour, they all disappeared. They didn’t even stay for the mass, and I wondered if their Lebanese employers dictated that they had to be home at a certain hour.

At 11pm people began to trickle in, and at 11:30 the choir started for real, but they didn’t sing any Christmas songs I knew. In fact some of the songs they sang were rather scary and sounded like they were meant for a funeral rather than the birth of someone who is supposed to save them from their own destruction. (Maybe it’s because they haven’t been saved from their own destruction…)

It was like musical chairs as the people came in. Everyone kept changing their seats, and it never really stopped throughout the mass. Many of them had never been in the church before, for they looked around and snapped pictures even though the sign said it was not allowed. Then a group of four Muslim women and a man walked in, snapping photos and laughing and generally being disrespectful. I guess it didn’t matter much because no one in the church was praying or reflecting. All we needed was some coffee and we could have been in a café with all the talking and socializing. Throughout the entire mass people got up and moved around and a quarter of them didn’t even stay until communion, and only half got up to take communion.

This is a country with 18 official religions, but just one mass said a lot to me. Religion to the Lebanese has nothing to do with a soul or spirituality. It is an identity, a tribe, something you are born with and have no responsibility to think about. Then again, that’s true with most religious people anywhere. People just say the creed because they were told to say it when they were children. They “believe” something because they are told to believe it. They are Catholic or Protestant or Sunni or Shia because they were born in a place and to a family that is Catholic or Protestant or Sunni or Shia.

I walked back from the church downtown and went to Amigo’s. After he closed we went to another place where the people were dancing debka, and I felt jealous because they were young people who were dancing a cultural dance and in America what people call dancing is just jumping up and down. About the only people in America that have anything like that are the bluegrass folks and square dancing. There’s also country line dancing but that feels mechanical and lacks life. The people in the bar were singing the songs like you would find happening in an Irish pub or a Greek Taverna or an Italian whatever it’s called in Italian, but the only time people sing songs in a bar in America is when drunk college kids sing Don’t Stop Believing or Living on a Prayer.

The spirituality that is lacking in Lebanese religious life can certainly be found in the debka and the old Arabic songs and the appreciation for music and culture. It was a pretty great Christmas.

(The only Christmas music I have on my computer are the U2-related ones in the video. I never ripped the Christmas music because when I'm listening to music on shuffle in July, I don't want to hear Mitch Miller and the Gang singing Jingle Bells.) By the way, internet in Lebanon is so slow that it took me AN HOUR to load this video!!!!!!!!!

Scrambled Eggs Fry My Ears

It was an unplanned attendance. Scrambled Eggs, a Lebanese rock band, was playing at The Basement in Gemeyzeh, and I found myself there with a friend. The Basement is another one of those ridiculously overpriced pretentious places in Gemeyzeh that are so expensive nobody actually drinks anything inside. Once we paid the 20000 ($15) cover, fine for a show, we headed to the bar for beers. Almaza. The stuff you can get for a dollar in a shop. 20 thousand, the bartender said. 20 thousand for two crappy Almazas. For that, I can get 6 Almazas at Amigo's pub.

The band wasn't bad, but the sound was horrible. The drums were way too loud and the guitar distortion way overdone. You couldn't understand a word from the singer, which was a big deal because they passed out CDs when you entered and on the cover it said "Peace is overrated, War is misunderstood" and I really wanted to see if they were being ironic in printing that or if they actually believed it. Normally, I'd assume it was irony, but this is Lebanon, where everything is literal.

The crowd itself was dull. They just stood there, lifeless, not drinking because of the outrageous prices, and not moving like they were suburban brats at a Coldplay concert, too cool for dancing, or maybe they didn't know what to do at a rock show, since rock music isn't exactly big here.

The decibel level of the whole show was like they thought they were playing in a stadium. IT WAS TOO LOUD. The Basement is a tiny venue. (My suspicions that Beirutis are half deaf were only bolstered by the decibel level. It's why they can bear the incessant honking and shouting and construction and blasted music at all hours.) I did see a few people holding their ears, so we weren't the only ones. It made what could have been a good show turn bad, and I was glad when they left the stage, though we were not given 30 seconds before a DJ blasted music and a couple of people began to dance. An older man who looked like a Western diplomat to me was really getting down on the tiny dance floor and made for an amusing sight.

I think I'd like the music, but they really need to rethink the volume.

Visit Scrambled Eggs MySpace page here.

It only took an hour to upload, but here are my photos from Tripoli

It was a dark and stormy night. And day.

It wasn’t until I left that I could describe completely how I had felt in Tripoli. Three letters. S-A-D. I walked its ancient streets and ran down the list of people who had lived here. Phoenicians. Seleucids. Romans. Byzantines. Ummayads. Abbasids. Fatimids. Crusaders. Mamluks. Ottomans. Temples became churches became mosques, each built on top of what was already there, making for some interesting architecture. The city was truly a gem in times past.

Now it’s a cool, cruel wreck of a city. Not that it hasn’t been wrecked before. It was pretty much wrecked by each one of those peoples when they sacked it. The worst was probably when the Mamluk sultan Qalaun massacred most of the population and razed the old town in 1289. He rebuilt it and much of the old city is covered with the black and white style of Mamluk architecture. Some of it is in marvelous condition for being seven hundred years old, likely thanks to the Ottomans, who had a healthy respect for building maintenance when they weren't destroying churches. The Ottomans were big into recycling buildings, turning churches they liked into mosques, schools into mosques, castles into mosques, mosques into mosques...

These kind of sieges feel like they are made for history books and blockbuster Hollywood movies, but they are real, and they continue. Though Tripoli didn’t see as much damage as South Lebanon during the civil war, they were still trying to slaughter each other up there, and the city was wrecked again as late as 2007 when Fatah al-Islam briefly took over the city before the Lebanese Armed Forces fought them back to the Palestinian refugee camp Nahr el Bared just 16 km from the city center. At that time the apartment of one of the taxi drivers I rode with was blown up by a jihadi bastard who is rotting in hell with the rest of the suicide bombers these and the rest of days.

Stupid War. So sad. Tripoli could be a beautiful town, but it probably never will be, because I'm quite certain that thousands of years of being under siege is not over. Someone else will come in and be possessed by the sea or whatever it is that makes people in this part of the world crazy. They'll come in and destroy the new high rises and cafes and restaurants that are popping up everywhere. They'll destroy the orange trees and lemon trees and palm trees that line the city streets and are found as commonly as a maple tree in an Ohio yard. They'll destroy the odd sense of calm that one finds in Tripoli after being in the cosmopolitan insanity of Beirut.

It poured. It poured the entire sea into the streets, creating rapid rivers with pavement for beds. We drove over a bridge with a foot of water on it and I wondered how long before the bridge collapsed and all of the cars with their stupid drivers who created a monstrosity of a traffic jam with their self-centered vehicular navigation plunged onto the concrete below. As the car moved slowly along the seaside through half a foot of water, the Mediterranean swells tossed a fish into the air and onto the walkway where feet would travel on a sunny day. I couldn't help but laugh at the sight of the silvery fish flapping around like a deranged bird. The storm seemed to travel in circles, pouring, brightening, pouring, brightening, dripping, flooding, flash, flash, boom.

I'll have to go back when the sun is shining and my shoes aren't soaking wet. I have a video of photos but don't have a fast enough internet connection to upload it.

Hamra Christmas

One of the Christmas trees that have appeared in Hamra over the last week or so. I'm looking forward to walking around Beirut closer to Christmas time to look at the various decorations in the neighborhoods. It's always interesting to experience Christmas time in other countries. This one is strange because it's so warm. Even though the days are awfully short (it's only 3pm and I ordered a beer thinking it was about 5 or so), it does not at all feel like it should be Christmas.

Tripoli July 2009

A few previously unpublished photos of Tripoli. I'd love to spend some time there as a tourist rather than rushing from meeting to meeting.

Hair Saloon

More previously unpublished photos of Beirut from July 2009.

Beirut July 2009

I found some photos from last year's trip to Beirut that I never published, so here they are.

Un jour a Clamart

Musique: Octobre par Francis Cabrel.

Danse Macabre

As I wandered the streets of Paris, I came across this cemetery, Père Lachaise. Many famous French are buried there, including artist Eugene Delacroix and writer Honore de Balzac. It's not every day you wander into a cemetery and stumble upon the graves of people you've heard of.

Music is Camille Saint Saen's Danse Macabre.

Wet

It was a dark and stormy night. No, really, it was. I had left beautiful, warm, sunny Beirut at 2pm for cold, dreary Paris. Oh, it was tough, maybe not as tough as it was the last time I left Beirut, if only because it had been so easy to return, but it was tough all the same and I fought tears in the airport again. I was leaving ten days of 100% contentment - Paris was my buffer between that and the winter of Washington.

I was to stay in a small town outside of Paris called Clamart. I wanted a bit of Europe rather than big city but didn't want to stray too far from the airport, so I settled for Clamart, a town close to Versailles. I had directions, which stated:

From Airport Charles de Gaulle: You can take a taxi to the hotel or you can take the RER B (blue) train and change trains at 'St-Michel Notre-Dame'. Change to the RER C train direction 'Versailles-Rive Guache'/'Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines' and get off at train stop 'Issy'. The hotel is at 25 minutes walking distance from the train station but of course it is better to take taxi from here to the hotel.

Seems simple enough, right? So I got on the train at CDG and got off at Issy (8 euro instead of the 50 a taxi would cost). It was raining.

I descended the stairway to the train station expecting a taxi or two to be waiting in front of it like you would expect taxis to do, but there were none, so I went into the station, where a helpful attendant gave me a phone number to call one. Easy enough, right? Except no one would answer the phone. I walked to the corner of the intersection to try to hail one on the street, but there were few who passed by and none who stopped. I called the hotel to tell them I was having trouble finding a cab (at this point it was nearly 10pm, the time I told them I'd be arriving), thinking they would call one for me, but the guy must have thought I was just calling to tell them I'd be late and he hung up on me. (I don't know how much AT&T charges for international roaming calls, and I'd already made two, so I didn't want to call again.) Did I mention it was raining?

My other option was to walk the "25 minutes" to the hotel. That would have been fine, except I had no idea in which direction it was, so I went to a nearby bus stop to see if there was a map. Nope. There were no people on the streets and nothing was open, so even asking someone was out of the question. I probably stood on that corner for twenty minutes trying to figure out what to do, and I was getting frustrated (and wet), so I just started to walk. I knew the town was Clamart, and there were road signs that pointed towards Clamart, so logically I followed them through the darkened suburbs of Paris on whose roads I had never roamed.

Despite not knowing where I was, I enjoyed the first minutes of my walk. I felt like I was in Europe for the first time on the trip. Paris is wonderful, but it is an international city, and my Europe days were spent in many small towns. I just wanted a taste of that once again, and I got it. But I was pulling a suitcase behind me, and I had a laptop and some books on my back, and after about 20 minutes of walking, I was getting tired and was unsure if I was going in the right direction. I came upon another bus stop. This one had a map, but my destination was not on it. Suddenly, a taxi came by! The driver slowed when I hailed him, and I thought I might be saved. Alas! He had a passenger, but he sympathized with me walking in the rain, pulling a suitcase behind me. He wanted to pick me up, but that passenger said no. %$#@!

So there I was, standing in the rain, wondering what on earth I was going to do. I had no choice but to walk on, so walk I did, walked like I hadn't been on a plane for four hours, walked like I hadn't left my heart behind, walked like I knew where I was going. I got to a curve and I just had to stop. I felt like breaking down right there, but then I turned around.

The whole city of Paris was out there, Eiffel Tower and all.

It was one of those moments when you just feel like you were supposed to be there, one of those times when something sucks all the bad from your soul and you feel like the most blessed person on earth for just being permitted to breathe. And on I walked, no longer doubting my decision to come to Clamart.

I walked another twenty minutes or so until I came to a circle, and behold! A town map! Turns out, I should have gone left a mile back, but it was ok, because I could take one of the streets from the circle to get to the street my hotel was on.

And so, an hour after I had arrived at the Issy train station, I found the Victor Hugo Hotel, where a warm shower and a lengthy sleep awaited me.

To be continued...

U2 in Paris

I couldn't believe I was seeing U2. It was over before I knew it. It was a good show, not great, not like NYC. The energy in the crowd was weird - better than DC, but still not what it could have been. And I got behind the same obnoxious people as I did at the DC show. Can you believe that? Of all the people in the world...

I wrote some notes before the show on my phone:

1. Of course, I had to get beside a group of loud Americans.

2. The queue. In the US, it is called a line, and a line it is - orderly and relatively straight. In Paris, it's more like a rugby scrum. Chaos ensued when the gates opened some 20 minutes after they were supposed to. I got in the slow line, each second getting me further from the stage. When I finally got through the gate and the all-to-familiar security check - the next part could happen in any country on Earth - the running for the grass. (Doucement, said the guards.) I went around back and asked in English if I could go in the circle before the guard had a chance to open his mouth. He said yes, I could go in. Then. A guard told him there were too many people and to cut it off. NOOOOO! I had failed by seconds! Perhaps a mere one person in the scrum I had let pass in all the pushing at the gates...

But.

The guy said a certain number could go in. I was one of the last people allowed. I'm not as close as NYC or DC but close enough to be happy.

3. The pushing is tiresome to me, a demonstration of either cultural definitions of space, arrogance, or, well, what else could it be? I am short; therefore, I get pushed around more than others. Shouldn't have worn so many clothes, as it is hot with all these people and I'm feeling claustrophobic.

I put my phone away once Interpol came on, who were quite boring. That was disappointing. Other things that happened:

I got conked on the head with and elbow and saw stars at one point. The guy who did it was apologetic.

There was this giant French guy next to me who spent more time filming than actually watching the show, and HIS elbow was in my face most of the time.

An Indian-American chick peed in a coke bottle right in the middle of the crowd.

The idiot Americans in front of me were taking up more space than anyone else, turned around, ate junk food they had brought the whole time, and complained about the French, while one of them was so upset by how close other people were to her that she didn't move the entire time. Her giant head blocked my view for a good part of the show. They were typically ugly American tourists, and I was embarrassed by them.

I wondered if Bono's back were hurting him a bit. It looked like he was leaning on Larry as they were leaving the stage and he was holding his arm in a strange way.

Bono spoke French (terrible accent, but he knew all the words). Good thing I could understand it, because aside from talking about Aung San Su Kyi in English, French was all he spoke.

The band didn't seem to have much energy - they feed off the crowd, and the crowd wasn't that energetic except when they seemed to think that songs like Elevation, Vertigo, and I Will Follow were for mosh pits. They did it for Beautiful Day, too. That was the first song they played, and all of the sudden, the whole crowd got pushed over several feet, bringing me a bit closer to the middle of the stage.

Listening to the crowd sing along with their French accents was funny.

Really liked one of the new songs they played - I don't know the title. Wanted more new stuff, but it was a bit weird hearing the new songs and not knowing them.

They didn't play enough from No Line on the Horizon. I really wanted to hear Breathe and No Line, but we only got Magnificent, Moment of Surrender, and the Crazy remix.

Got to hear Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me live for the first time, but they did it in place of Ultraviolet, which had been the highlight of the 360 show.

Got to hear Until the End of the World, still my all time favorite song.

I was a little disappointed with the set list, actually. Some of the weaker songs were played while songs like New Years Day were not.

Bono nailed the Italian opera solo on Miss Sarajevo. It really was incredible - I have never heard his voice sound so good. He had people's mouths drop.

Oh, it was awesome.

UPDATE: Some awesome videos of the show. When they are zoomed in, they are my exact view of the concert, minus the hands and the heads in the way. I'm sure my hands are in one of these videos. Really incredible how technology allows us to recall things we might otherwise forget. Man, life is really amazing, isn't it? Why do so many people waste it on warring and anger?

The videos:

Bono is a rock star, but occasionally, he is also a singer. A real one. And this is the proof. Wait until you get to about the 3 minute mark. Incredible. This may have been my favorite moment during the show.



The new song I loved is called Mercy.



My all time favorite song. Jesus, meet Judas:



They want you to be Jesus, and go down on one knee, but they want their money back if you're alive at...53.



The quintessential international development song, turned into a beautiful weirdness, with Larry playing tabla, Adam playing the bass line from Last Night on Earth, and Bono singing lines from a Duran Duran song. In the 360 shows I've seen, aside from Ultraviolet, this is my favorite song they did. If they want to sell more records, they need to put out more weirdness like this.



I am reminded of a very bizarre dream I had last night with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yeah, him.


The beginning of the show. Return of the Stingray Guitar to start. More of this, please. Then, one of the greatest songs every written, Beautiful Day, about finding the beauty in a world full of shit.



Another awesome new song, North Star. New album now, please?



Not my view, but any post without this song would be missing something great. A very underrated song, and a very good ending to a very amazing show.



This is the song when I got conked on the head.



I am blown away by the fact I got to see this. Not sure what I've done to have the luck I've had in my life, but I sure appreciate it, more than words could ever say.

A Moment in Hamra

It was a shriek that made you forget about the car horns and the din of the traffic. The culprit was a toy whistle blown by a former cop whose mind had seen better days. He was clean shaven and wore a green shirt and jeans that had never been in fashion, but he was well-groomed and obviously had someone to take care of him. Where was that someone as he stood on the sidewalk, blowing the toy whistle and thinking he was directing traffic on Hamra Street?

A massive tour bus from Dubai rolled over the cobblestones. Two truckloads of bored soldiers rumbled by looking like they'd rather be anywhere else. The traffic was thick but moving, always a bonus on this gridlocked street. Arabic music blared from loudspeakers strapped upon the rooftop of a car adorned with flags of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. More sectarianism, each group claiming to love Lebanon the most while taking steps to divide and destroy it.

The SSNP had hung their sectarian flags throughout the neighborhood some time in the night. We had all gone to bed in Hamra to wake up to this nonsense. The Cedar Revolution was dead. One fourth of an entire country had turned up that day, March 14, 2005, but the hope for unity that had been inspired by that day was all but gone.

Wedged between two universities, Hamra is a sore sight for eyes but has the soul of the Left Bank and the desire to be normal in a place where nothing has ever been normal and probably never will be. But there is a fire in the ground now, the same molten hatred that flows beneath the surface of all of Lebanon. Hamra sits across town from the pretentious glitter of Gemmayzeh and the riches of the haves in Achrafieh, two areas that were part of what was once called East Beirut in a city that throbs with the violence of division. East-West, North-South, the whole world is a fractured compass, its needle spinning mercilessly as we all desperately try to find our place in it.

Last week, as I sat beneath the glow of dusk and watched the flutter of bats among the filthy buildings that seemed to be contemplating crumbling their ways to dusty death, I wondered if this was ever a beautiful place or if its creation was a spontaneous explosion of chaos that gave rise to these ugly dwelling stones. The life, though, the life is real. It manifests itself in various forms - in the youth of students, in the rattle of traffic, in the experience of bartenders, in the clacking of prayer beads among the devout and not so devout. Here, people live for Now, because tomorrow violence could take the peace away.

No one wants the violence; they are a weary people, yet it cannot be filtered from their sectarian being. Even when they shun religious identity, they replace it with some other religion - communism, anti-zionism, graphic design, not different than most of the world but far more pronounced.

So it goes.

Finally, some Paris photos

The Beginning

So much to write about - where do I begin? It started with surrealism, moved into perfection, and ended with a heaviness of heart and a rather smooth flight across the Atlantic.

I departed Washington, DC on a cloudy day, racing down U Street to the Metro, then hopping a bus to Dulles before being thrown around the airport. I was flying United because it was the cheapest flight I could find, though I much prefer Air France. United is...how should I put it? Disorganized? When you fly Air France, you check in online and give them your bags. There is no such thing as a line. With United, you check in online then are sent to a billion different places before you finally are able to give your bags to the sketchy looking security people and hope that they actually get to your destination.

I should say bag. I had one bag. It contained a few clothes and 8 bottles of different American beer for my friend Amigo. The beer made the bag pretty heavy. I hoped it'd get to Paris and then to Beirut in one piece. It did.

My greatest curse is my fear of flying. Love to travel, hate getting there. This time, I actually slept a couple of hours on the flight, something I can never do.

During the previous couple of weeks, my brain actually was adjusting to the time zone change - it was quite an amazing subconscious process. I just started waking up earlier and earlier and going to bed earlier until I was already asleep by the time the Daily Show came on. I really can't get over that. When I got to Paris on a Friday morning at 7am, then managed to get to my hotel by 9am (to discover I couldn't check in until 3pm but could leave my bag full o'booze), I set out to wander the streets of Paris wide awake, happy, and not at all full of yawns. I got back to the hotel around 4pm, checked in, and took a two hour nap before heading out to Montmartre and Sacre Coeur. Went to bed around 10pm, and voila, I was fully in Parisian time.

But I never felt fully in Paris. Yes, I was physically there and very happy, but I felt a sort of disconnect, like it was all surreal. I went wandering the next morning down streets I used to know and discovered I had very little memory of any of it. I got to Stade de France around 3pm and managed to get in the inner circle for the U2 concert, but never fully felt like I was really there. Even now, a couple of weeks later, I can't figure out how to explain it. What I can explain, however, is how I spent ten days in a place where I felt 100% whole. For the first time since I can remember, maybe in my entire life, I felt like I was physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally in the same place at the same time. As my friend Ash would say, I was totally living in the Now. That place wasn't Paris, it was Hamra.

And so, in the next few days, I will be posting about the trip with photos and videos and write ups of the amazing things that happened and how the whole direction of my life is probably changed and how I am once again scattered across the globe - mentally in Paris, physically in Washington, with my heart stuck in filthy, chaotic Hamra, just waiting for me to retrieve it. And I will, as soon as I can.

Tick, tick, tick...

The writing said Sylvania at the end of the glowing tube above my head, a tube that was sucking the soul of out me. Octron, it was called, made in Mexico, probably manufactured beneath the same glowing tubes. There was a slight yellow tint to most of these soul-sucking abominations, though a few glowed almost purple and one of them was dark. I stared at them in revulsion. When I looked away, my eyes were filled with spots, spots that skewed the view of the glowing screen in front of me. Everything glowed, everything was artificial, even the afternoon fatigue that had routinely overcome me, the result of hours beneath those tubes and in front of that screen.

I'm leaving for Paris on Thursday to reclaim some of my soul. If only I could go to sleep and wake up Friday in Montmartre.

Bourdain returns to Beirut

The first time I ever saw No Reservations was a rerun of the 2006 Beirut episode. I was as angry about the invasion when I saw it as I was when it was first happening. I'll never forget the day the war began. I went screaming through the office halls and said some pretty nasty things about Israel, all well-deserved. And there I was, safe and sound in Washington, DC. It was a totally helpless feeling.

I didn't know back then how much Lebanon would become a part of my life. Now I know Beirut very well and have many friends in Lebanon. I am just as repulsed by Israel aggression as I was back then, but I know, too, that Lebanon is not innocent.

I'm looking forward to this episode - I even set my alarm so I don't forget. I hope he didn't stick to the overpriced, overrated pretentious restaurants but really got some of the local flavor.

Paris September 2010

Thirty-eight days. Actually, it's only 36 until I leave, insha'allah. I have to wait until payday on Friday to get my ticket. I saw Dulles-CDG for $579 yesterday, and I am praying that one of those fares is still available on Friday. The rest were outrageous, but I'm going to Paris no matter what, even if I have to survive on the sugar packets I can get in the office coffee room.

It's been ten years since I've set foot in the City of Lights, ten long years in which I have seen the city as a tiny Lego town from an airplane window more times than I can count. This time, the plane is landing, and I am taking the bus into the city. These last ten years have been peppered with moments in time when my desire for Paris has been overwhelming. I can remember the time I vowed I would go to Europe at least once a year for the rest of my life. That was in 1999, the third year in a row I was in Europe. I made it one year after that until I broke down and went to Eastern Europe in 2007. But it wasn't Paris.

It was, well, I don't even know when it was that U2 announced they would be performing in 2010 - sometime in late autumn, or maybe December. I can say with a straight face that those two shows in NYC in September 2009 were two of the greatest nights of my life. It was a natural high, and totally worth getting sick after because I went without food or drink and stood up for basically two days straight, even though I was sick for the DC show a few days later (but that didn't matter so much because the suburban zombies who pass for music fans in DC made the show suck a little.) When the band announced a few more dates in 2010 and they gave us U2.com subscriber folks (that's what they call a fanclub these days) a chance to get tix, well, something came over me, and I did. And what city would I choose but the subject of my urban lust for a decade.

Of course, at the time, there was no North American announcement and I thought now here's the chance to get to see them two years in a row after thirteen years of having to wait four or five years between shows. But logically I knew they'd come back to North America, in one of those many, many layers we sort of generically label as the human brain.

So, ten years. I left Paris in February 2000 after spending a week in France - Dijon and some tiny town in Bourgogne I can't remember the name of but it was the best France experience I ever had because, well, it wasn't Paris, and the French get a bad rap because Americans, the few who actually go to France, usually only go to Paris, and, well, Paris is a city, and in cities, people are less friendly to tourists because tourists are SO FREAKING ANNOYING. Believe me, I know. I have lived in DC for most of the last seven years, and my tiny town of 600,000 swells to 1,600,000 on any given summer day. Although I gotta give props to the parents who bring their kids to DC instead of Disneyland. You're doing something right.

Paris is definitely a city of the past. I once wrote something somewhere about how it seemed like Paris was the past, London was the present, and Berlin was the future. (I was 22. Give me a break.) I don't mean Paris is a city of the past in a bad way, and I know Parisians hate when people say this, but Paris is a giant outdoor museum to European history. Frankly, I think they should be proud of this. (And come on, Americans - without the French, there would be no America. They helped us beat the limey asses across the channel to get our independence. One of my favorite quotes of all time is Patton's quote on D-Day: "Lafayette, nous sommes arrive." It was a thank you. I'd much rather have a "special relationship" with France than with those folks up north.) But Europe is "Europe" now, and should always remain so, because they figured out a way to stop fighting (and if I prayed, I'd pray the EU sticks together, but they really shouldn't have expanded so quickly, and they shouldn't make those retarded laws they are prone to do, like German barmaids can't wear sleeveless shirts because they might get sunburn.)

I love Paris for its past, especially for its literary past. Not only did they have great thinkers and writers roaming those cobblestone streets, but the best in all the world roamed there. My personal favorite, James Joyce, did most of his writing there in the same places as some of my other favorites, like Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. It's a place where thought once roamed, like New York.

But it's been ten years. I'm afraid. Please don't have a Charmucks on every corner.

That Toddlin' Town

My trip to Chicago USA over 4th of July weekend 2010 to see the Cincinnati Reds take on the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. Music by Frank Sinatra and Sufjan Stevens, both songs titled "Chicago." Photos are mine.

I Am a Visitor

I am a visitor in my town.

I am a visitor in my country.

I walk the wide, sterile streets and breathe the hot, sterile air and know that body and soul are two distinct things because I am here but I am there. I can't cross the roads because there's too much order and too many laws. I can't pick my produce because I know inside that big beautiful shell is a genetically engineered lack of flavor. I want my freshly squeezed orange juice and lemonade made from fruits that were grown a few miles from where they're sold. I want my bright Mediterranean sunshine, not this oddly weak light that trickles from the Washington sky. (When it's not raining.)

What is this rush? Why are the people of this city in such a hurry? Where are the people who stop to smell the acacia, the agalinis, and the scarlet pimpernel along the way? Where are those who take the time to appreciate the clean, clean air, who appreciate breathing?

I keep asking myself what time is it there? What are they doing? What is he doing?

And now - a ring. It's funny how a phone call can make you so happy. Just five minutes of Lebanon, five minutes of the voice of my friend, and now I am smiling.

I ordered a dart board today - it should be here in 3-6 business days. I hope it's three. I might enter a tournament held on Labor Day weekend that I discovered when I found the Washington Area Darts Association website. The prize is $10,000. If I practice all summer, I'm sure I could compete. What you see here is a game I won by hitting three bullseyes on the last shot to win the game by two points. The score was 121 to 119 (I had 121) but Amigo had closed his bulls and only needed to hit one to win. I needed to hit three, and I did.

I gave Amigo my Reds t-shirt beer coolie. I brought it to the pub once because the condensation from the beer was making it difficult to play darts and I knew he'd get a kick out of it. So there is at least one Cincinnati Reds item in Lebanon, and he's actually using it.

I'd love to be there right now, drinking Almaza and talking about the wobbly, wobbly world.

At least I have baseball. And this weekend, there will be lots and lots of baseball. The Cincinnati Reds will take on the Washington Nationals. Then on Sunday after the game I get to see the Cincinnati band The National play in Washington.

It's Beirut, no contest

If I were to write out a list of pros and cons about leaving Beirut, you would assume that I'd be ecstatic about returning to Washington.

PROS

• Clean air
• No smoking
• People speaking my language
• Live baseball
• Functional internet
• Clean city
• Sam Adams and varieties in beer
• Indian restaurants and any other kind of food you can think of
• No idiotic honking
• Cars driving between the lines, stopping at traffic lights, and using turn signals
• No Lebanese pop music blaring from cars and stores
• Time zone
• No World Cup insanity
• Not risking death just crossing the street
• Service in restaurants
• Substance over style
• Bike lanes
• More time and structure for work
• Not running all over Beirut trying to get to meetings without a car
• Public transportation
• Will get more than three or four hours of sleep a night
  

CONS

• No Evergreen Pub, no Amigo, no Johnny or General or Ahmed or Issam or Nabil or Ash (when he gets back to Beirut), no more listening to Amigo's excuses for losing at darts
  
• No Hamra - no filthy, beat up, tired old Hamra
• Washington is expensive
• Closing times in bars
• No office view of the Mediterranean, or window in general
• No beach, no sea
• No By the Way Pub or Rock Inn in the wee hours of the morning, no listening to Amigo's life stories or crazy ideas about the world over cardboard steaks or thyme-drenched pastries and laughing about how it's daylight.
• Back to using email instead of having face to face conversations for work
• Same old tired hangouts in DC
  

I used to live for the moment, but I finally found a moment I like and it has to end. C'est la vie.

Circumstance

A yellow crane stands tall amidst the backdrop of a deep blue sky and a tangle of wires and antennae as I sit on my balcony contemplating the string of events throughout my entire life that have led to this moment and how very little I actually had to do with it.

I wasn’t even born when the war started in Beirut, and I grew up with news images depicting an apocalypse in the city in which I now sit. If there had never been a war, there’d be no need to be here. If Hitler hadn’t been born, I wouldn’t be here, for the state of Israel wouldn’t exist and there’d be less conflict in the Middle East. If the Ottomans had won World War I, I wouldn’t be here. If the Crusaders had crushed the Muslims, I wouldn’t be here. If the South had won the American Civil War, I probably wouldn’t be here, either, because the United States would not be the economic powerhouse it is today.

Why is each chapter of history books marked by the beginning or end of another war?

Last night I learned that a friend’s son had been killed in an automobile accident. He was 21 years old. I thought about the circumstances of our friendship and how odd it is that we even met at all – me, a well-educated American and she, a Ukranian whose profession is considered unsavory in most circles of the world. Next week she was supposed to go back to Ukraine for six months. Instead, she is leaving today to go bury her son. What were the circumstances that led him to be in that car at that exact moment? Think of the billions of possibilities that could have put him two seconds behind. He’d have woken up today and his mother would cook him dinner next week.

My friend Ash told me “Time does not exist” but I keep trying to convince him he’s wrong. I tell him “time” is just a word humans created to help them talk about an abstract concept. Human language is so limiting because most human beings are either unwilling or unable to comprehend things that exist outside their minds. They invent things like God to explain away the things they can’t explain and believe words are static and narrow. But Time and God and Fate are all the same unknowable concept. They should be understood as something mathematical, for everything in the world is mathematics. E=mc². Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Our bodies are mathematics, too, just combinations of molecules, chemicals derived from various combinations of electrons and protons and smaller miracles. Mathematics is what distinguishes a human being from an ashtray. (Not a reference to Ash but to a conversation I had with Amigo last night when he tried to tell me there is no difference between a human being and an ashtray.) I’m human because the energy worked to create carbon and hydrogen and oxygen in the right numbers. The ashtray is an ashtray because the energy combined differently to create different elements.

Amigo was right, in a way. Human beings put too much emphasis on words. We call the yellow thing in front of me a crane because it’s a heck of a lot easier to say “crane” than to describe the physics and chemistry that allow it to exist and do the work it does. Mathematics. Look at how we transmit data these days – in series of zeroes and ones. I am listening to a man from Cincinnati sing about our wobbly world at the moment, but his voice isn’t real – it’s just a series of zeroes and ones translated by the miracle of Microsoft.

Oh, the things you talk in a pub about when politics and religion are banned topics of conversation. Anyway, it’s time to go play darts with Ash and Amigo and show them how poor my math skills really are.

Beirut Story

A young man stood beneath the ruins of what had once been a glorious Venetian-style building smoking a cigarette and wearing his idleness proudly upon his sleeve. He watched as the people walked by, watched a fat mother pulling along a crying girl in a bright yellow dress, watched the hijab-clad women walk behind those for whom modesty was no concept, watched the taxis go by leaving trails of exhaust behind them. The relic above him had been spared most war damage but was desecrated by years of neglect and disuse. Trees grew from the crumbling concrete balconies while the street level of the building held a stylish eye glasses shop, a cell phone store, and a tiny market selling useless junk, its windows covered in posters of a politician running for municipal elections who looked suspiciously like Alex Trabek. Flags of various countries competing for the World Cup hung from a rope outside. The American flag was noticeably absent, as it was in all the shops with World Cup displays across Beirut.

“Kifak?’ the young man suddenly shouted in greeting another young man across the street.

“Mneha. Shu fi ma fi?” The newcomer, a light-skinned man in his early twenties, narrowly avoided being hit by a motorscooter driving the wrong direction down a one way street as he walked towards his friend. He ran his hand through his curly hair and laughed.

“Where are you going?” the first man asked in English.

“Library. I have a paper due tomorrow.”

“You always have papers!” he replied laughing.

“Because I study a real subject!” His friend playfully slapped him on the shoulder.

“We go to meet for a drink tonight. Will you come?”

“If I finish. Wayn brooh?”

“Evergreen.”

“Tayib. I will call. Ciao.”

The first young man threw his cigarette butt on the ground as his friend walked away and reached into the pocket of his jeans to start a new one, pulling out a piece of paper with the pack. He mechanically read what was on the paper before throwing it to the ground.

Call me – 71693199 – Molly

Molly was an Irish chick he had met at the pub to whom he had paid a little too much attention. He didn’t like Western women. He told himself this was because they were too sexually liberal, but occasionally he recognized his dislike of the strength and confidence they exuded as a result of Western gender equality. Molly also worked for an international NGO, and he despised these neo-imperialist organizations who felt they needed to “fix” his country.

The old man who ran the small junk shop sat outside it in a white plastic chair. An empty one sat beside him until another man arrived to fill it. He was younger than the shop owner and what remained of his hair was still black. The two of them jabbered on in Arabic for a time before an old man shuffled up and greeted them with boisterous hand gestures that contradicted the limited mobility of his legs. The younger man stood up.

“Sit down,” he said in Arabic as he extended a hand to the place where his corpulent body had been.

“Yislamu, yislamu,” the old man replied in gratitude.

“Ahlan wa sahlan, ahlan wa sahlan. Kifak, ya Fadi?”

“Mneha, alhamdullah.” The conversation continued in Arabic among the three of them with the younger man standing in the middle of the sidewalk, oblivious to pedestrians who had to squeeze by him to pass. The old man pointed to the young man standing idly and smoking another cigarette.

“Look at these young people standing around all day doing nothing. They are spoiled. Their parents provide them with fancy cars and money to go to nightclubs and shopping and they do nothing with their lives. Nothing!”

“But there aren’t enough jobs for all of them,” the younger man replied.

“Of course there are but they won’t do them. Look at the construction works in this city – the Palestinians and the immigrants do the work because the Lebanese young people won’t do it!” He sighed. “This construction. They are destroying Beirut in a different way than the war. They build these skyscrapers that have no soul. I used to be able to see the sea and the mountains from my window. Now I see nothing. Nothing! Only ugly high rises. A tragedy in concrete!”

The shopkeeper lit a cigarette and kicked a candy wrapper on the ground. “I don’t recognize my city anymore. Downtown has no character. I remember running around in the days of my youth. Oh, the nightlife! Now it is Western chain restaurants and exclusive nightclubs for the superficial young people who only care about materialism.”

The old man broke into a song by Lebanon’s most famous chanteuse, Fairouz.

“To Beirut…
From the soul of her people she makes wine,
From their sweat she makes bread and jasmine.
So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire?”

His mournful wail was but a pale reflection of Fairouz, but the pain and soul was just as deep. His lamentation was interrupted by the clatter of screeching tires, crunching metal, and angry shouting. Two cars had collided at the intersection. Culpability laid with one of the drivers who had refused to obey the recently installed traffic lights of Beirut. Despite driving through the red light, he still blamed the other driver.

A crowd gathered around the accident, more because it was something that happened rather than out of curiosity. The three men in front of the shop halted their conversation to stare at the scene before them, and the young man gravitated towards the corner because it was something to do. He flicked away his cigarette butt and lit another with the indifference of a child who gets clothes for Christmas.

The owners of the wrecks did not stop yelling even as they exchanged insurance information. They drove away without involving the police and the street returned to its bustling idleness.

“I am out of cigarettes,” the young man told the shopkeeper, who disappeared inside the shop before retuning with a pack. The exchange of money must have triggered something in the young man’s brain, because he took out his mobile and made a call.

“Allo, Fouad? Kifak? Mneha, mneha. Shoof, bedi birooh Costa. Yalla. Ok, see you in a few minutes.” He would meet his friend at the Italian coffee chain. The old man made a sucking sound so typically Lebanese and shook his head.

“See?” he began in Arabic. “The young people are the reason we lose our city. If they do not go to the Western coffee shop and pay four dollars for a fancy Western coffee drink, these chains would not be destroying the soul of Beirut.”

“What do you want?” the younger man asked. “We have war for fifteen years. Where does money come from to rebuild the city?”

“Hariri rebuilt downtown with no regard for the people of Beirut,” the old man replied curtly. “He wanted more money. Money, money, it’s always about money! Money and power! That monstrosity downtown is not a mosque; it’s a temple for Hariri!”

“Hariri, God rest his soul, did much to rescue us from our own destruction,” the shopkeeper replied rather timidly.

“Why did he not rebuild the buildings as they were? Why did he have to take the sea away from the people?”

“He’s not the only one building high rises,” the shopkeeper replied with an arm gesture that mimicked the skyscrapers.

“These rich people, they left like cowards during the war and made money in America and returned to take advantage of Lebanon being weak from the war!” The old man was shouting, but no one seemed to notice. “They cheat their fellow Lebanese. It is shameful. Shameful!”

“They are trying to make reforms,” the shopkeeper said. “Insha’allah, the government will make regulations and…”

“The government! What good is the government? They are all the same people who tried to destroy the country, or they are their sons! What good is the government, I ask you. They are the ones responsible for destroying Beirut during the war and now!”

Neither the shopkeeper nor the younger man could disagree.

“These men are not Lebanese – they’re slaves to the Syrians and the Iranians and the Saudis and the French and the Americans – especially the Americans!”

“Some of them aren’t.”

“Hizbollah are slaves to the Americans, too, because they are obsessed with the Americans! They would rather destroy Lebanon than stop obsessing about the Americans!” The old man threw his hands into the air. “Hizbollah is the whore of Lebanon!”

The younger man could not help but smile at that statement.

“When is Lebanon going to be Lebanon?” the old man continued. “When will we stop being puppets?”

Across the street, a young American sat at an outside table at the locally-owned coffee shop, sipping a cappuccino and trying to follow the conversation across the street with his limited understanding of Lebanese Arabic. His ears had swallowed the word “Amrikiin” and he could not help but listen. Despite being critical of American foreign policy and the materialistic way of life of Americans, he found himself increasingly defending America, which surprised him because he had left his country in disgust.

A young girl who should have been in school approached the American trying to sell him lottery tickets. She would be prevented from growing up to be a beautiful woman by the curse of poverty, a circumstance resulting from the coincidence of her birth as a Palestinian in Lebanon.

“Please sir,” she begged in Arabic. “Please sir, please,” she said as she pushed the lottery tickets under his nose.

“La.”

“Please sir.”

“La. La, la!” Her insistence made him angry. He shooed her away like a stray dog. He pretended to stir his coffee so he didn’t have to see the shame in her desperate eyes. She couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven but had lost the innocence of childhood long ago. As she drifted away the American tried to push guilt from his mind.

“I can’t buy from every beggar who approaches me,” he muttered to himself. “I can’t save them.” His cappuccino was topped with liquid chocolate in a pattern resembling a spiderweb. “We are all trapped in our own way,” he continued. A burly man stared at the muttering American as he walked past the coffee shop, but the American was unfazed by the attention. “Why are there no American flags in the World Cup displays? What kind of propaganda do these people hear?” The burly man disappeared around the corner, but not before the old man spotted him.

“Khalas!” he screamed. “This is one of Hariri’s slaves!” He nodded towards the burly man. “I knew his father. He was a very bad man and so is his son and his friends. They would eat from the floor if Hariri told them to. They cannot think for themselves! All of them are rotten!”

As the old man said nothing further, the younger man said, “Well, I should be going,” and left the shopkeeper to the ramblings of the old man. The American had lost interest in the conversation and was only waiting for his check when a young Lebanese man sat down at his table.

“Alex!” the Lebanese man said.

“Hey, Jad, what’s up?”

“We are going for drinks tonight. Will you come?”

“I don’t know, Jad. Anna and I were planning on dinner…”

“Bring her! And other Alex, too! It will be our own United Nations pub!”

“I just don’t know if I should drink tonight. It’s too much…”

“Every night is good for drinking!”

Alex’s eyes wandered to the flower boxes full of red geraniums that lined the rails of the terrace as if they reminded him of something painful in his past.

“We’ll see,” was his reply. “These damn Lebanese waiters! I just want my check. Where is he?”

The old man across the street was right about the young people. Jad supposedly had a job but there he was a 3pm cloaked in overpriced jeans and an overpriced t-shirt that said “LOOK AT ME!” in large silver letters. It should have been the uniform for these elite youth. Jad’s position was supposedly that of “graphic designer,” the typical program of study for these elites who couldn’t be bothered to work hard or dirty their hands. Rather than building the country, they played around on computers all day holding the most inane conversations on social media sites in bad English and broken Arabic using the bizarre linguistic system that mixed the Latin alphabet and Western numbers rather than using Arabic script.

“You are in a bad mood; this is the reason to have a drink!”

A bus rolled by with two boys in pinstriped uniforms dancing in the aisle with no concern for the movement of their dance floor. They would grow up to be like Jad.

“Fine, I’ll go, but not for very long.”

“You always say that.” Jad stood to go and made the slightest of hand motions, prompting the waiter to come to the table. Alex paid his check and included a tip despite the poor service. As he wandered down the street and out of sight, he muttered curses about the Lebanese people and the chaos and filth in which they lived.

A walking disaster

I have been in Lebanon for a mere three and a half months, and it has really sought to destroy me. In that short amount of time, I have:

• Had food poisoning four times, once for a whole week that made Montezuma seem merciful.
• Had several respiratory infections, two of which were pretty bad, one of which I tried to ignore and ended up passing it on to Amigo, who didn’t open his bar one Saturday night because he was so sick.
• Had shoulder tendonitis from playing darts – that was at the beginning. Apparently after playing so much for so many weeks, I have strengthened whatever tendons were inflamed and don’t have that problem any more.
• Hurt my back to the point where I couldn’t sit for more than an hour at a time without unbearable pain. I don’t know how I hurt it, but I think it was when I tripped over some random metal thing sticking out of a sidewalk.
• Had numbness in my left hand for a still unidentified reason.
• And the latest – Yesterday as I was walking home from the office, I turned to look at the progress made at the construction site next to the Roman columns downtown when suddenly I felt like my legs had been blown off at the knees. Turns out it was only a very hard park bench. Today not one but both knees are swollen enough that it hurts to walk.

What a mess.

World Cup Fever in Lebanon - it's an illness

I'm not much of a soccer fan. I mean, I played in high school and did some coaching, so it's not like I don't like the sport. It's just that I don't follow it. That being said, I do get excited for the World Cup. Last World Cup I watched the US lose to Ghana in the middle of Times Square. I remember going downstairs to the hotel bar at lunch to watch games with work colleagues and going to the Lucky Bar in DC to watch a couple of games.

But I am disturbed by what I find here in Beirut. World Cup flags are everywhere - every store sells World Cup merchandise, and it seems one out of five cars has a flag flying from its window. It's quite strange that people would be flying the flags of other countries like this. I mean, it's one thing to say you favor France or Italy because they have good players. It's another thing to detail your entire car with Brazil-related pictures, unless, of course, you are Brazilian. But when you're from a small dysfunctional country like Lebanon with no decent professional soccer league and you have no hope in hell of ever getting into the World Cup, what do you do? Cling to the role of the conquered you've played for nearly your entire existence by embracing the neo-imperialist flags of capitalism? While Lebanese people spout off their diatribes about the Evil West(TM), they've been suckered into one of the largest capitalist events in the world.

What's even more disturbing to me is the fact that of all the flags for sale, you can't find a single Stars and Stripes. I tell you what, that pisses me off more than anything I've experienced in this country. (Also notice the Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden masks in the window.) It's not America's fault they can't get along with each other. I'm tired of America being blamed for all the world's problems. We have our problems yes and we are aggressive, and when I'm in the US, I am very vocal and critical about these problems, so it's strange for me to have to defend my country in a way that mimics the America First crowd. But come on. America isn't the one keeping the Shia on the lower rungs of the food chain. America isn't the one preventing Palestinians from being able to work and live outside of concentration camps in Lebanon. We aren't the ones who created the culture of corruption and nepotism that keeps Lebanon from developing into a fully functional democracy. And we don't tolerate swastikas.

It took all I had not to egg this car sitting under my balcony. I had an egg in my hand. I thought of leaving a note on the window saying something like "$#@! you, you nazi scum." Well, at least the thought of doing it made me feel a little better about having to see that thing every day.

Racists are cowards, the lowest of the low, mangy stray dogs who rummage in the garbage bins of human existence, and racism is sadly a part of Lebanese national culture. Mein Kampf is not only readily available in the bookstores of Beirut, but it is proudly displayed in the windows of the shops. Hitler, who is responsible for the death of 50-70 million people because he waged World War II, is a hero to many Lebanese. Please, please don't glorify this demon.

Does Israel suck? Yes, yes it does. The State of Israel is one of the world's most evil regimes, right up there with the Iranian nutjobs and the North Korean psychopath. But pointing fingers and wallowing in self-pity and hatred has never changed the world except for the worse. Until the Lebanese people stop tolerating swastikas and other forms of hatred, conflict will be a regular visitor to the country. Man up, Lebanon! Show some courage! Seek peace!